THE KING OF YVETOT.
There was a king of Yvetot, Of whom renown hath little said, Who let all thoughts of glory go, And dawdled half his days a-bed; And every night, as night came round, By Jenny, with a nightcap crowned, Slept very sound: Sing ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he! That's the kind of king for me. And every day it came to pass, That four lusty meals made he; And, step by step, upon an ass, Rode abroad, his realms to see; And wherever he did stir, What think you was his escort, sir? Why, an old cur. Sing ho, ho, ho! &c. If e'er he went into excess, 'Twas from a somewhat lively thirst; But he who would his subjects bless, Odd's fish!—must wet his whistle first; And so from every cask they got, Our king did to himself allot, At least a pot. Sing ho, ho! &c. To all the ladies of the land, A courteous king, and kind, was he; The reason why you'll understand, They named him Pater Patriae. Each year he called his fighting men, And marched a league from home, and then Marched back again. Sing ho, ho! &c. Neither by force nor false pretence, He sought to make his kingdom great, And made (O princes, learn from hence),— "Live and let live," his rule of state. 'Twas only when he came to die, That his people who stood by, Were known to cry. Sing ho, ho! &c. The portrait of this best of kings Is extant still, upon a sign That on a village tavern swings, Famed in the country for good wine. The people in their Sunday trim, Filling their glasses to the brim, Look up to him, Singing ha, ha, ha! and he, he, he! That's the sort of king for me.
THE KING OF BRENTFORD. ANOTHER VERSION.
There was a king in Brentford,—of whom no legends tell, But who, without his glory,—could eat and sleep right well. His Polly's cotton nightcap,—it was his crown of state, He slept of evenings early,—and rose of mornings late. All in a fine mud palace,—each day he took four meals, And for a guard of honor,—a dog ran at his heels, Sometimes, to view his kingdoms,—rode forth this monarch good, And then a prancing jackass—he royally bestrode. There were no costly habits—with which this king was curst, Except (and where's the harm on't?)—a somewhat lively thirst; But people must pay taxes,—and kings must have their sport, So out of every gallon—His Grace he took a quart. He pleased the ladies round him,—with manners soft and bland; With reason good, they named him,—the father of his land. Each year his mighty armies—marched forth in gallant show; Their enemies were targets—their bullets they were tow. He vexed no quiet neighbor,—no useless conquest made, But by the laws of pleasure,—his peaceful realm he swayed. And in the years he reigned,—through all this country wide, There was no cause for weeping,—save when the good man died. The faithful men of Brentford,—do still their king deplore, His portrait yet is swinging,—beside an alehouse door. And topers, tender-hearted,—regard his honest phiz, And envy times departed—that knew a reign like his.
LE GRENIER.
Je viens revoir l'asile où ma jeunesse De la misère a subi les leçons. J'avais vingt ans, une folle maîtresse, De francs amis et l'amour des chansons Bravant le monde et les sots et les sages, Sans avenir, riche de mon printemps, Leste et joyeux je montais six étages. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans! C'est un grenier, point ne veux qu'on l'ignore. Là fut mon lit, bien chétif et bien dur; Là fut ma table; et je retrouve encore Trois pieds d'un vers charbonnés sur le mur. Apparaissez, plaisirs de mon bel âge, Que d'un coup d'aile a fustigés le temps, Vingt fois pour vous j'ai mis ma montre en gage. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans! Lisette ici doit surtout apparaître, Vive, jolie, avec un frais chapeau; Déjà sa main à l'étroite fenêtre Suspend son schal, en guise de rideau. Sa robe aussi va parer ma couchette; Respecte, Amour, ses plis longs et flottans. J'ai su depuis qui payait sa toilette. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans! A table un jour, jour de grande richesse, De mes amis les voix brillaient en choeur, Quand jusqu'ici monte un cri d'allégresse: A Marengo Bonaparte est vainqueur. Le canon gronde; un autre chant commence; Nous célébrons tant de faits éclatans. Les rois jamais n'envahiront la France. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans! Quittons ce toit où ma raison s'enivre. Oh! qu'ils sont loin ces jours si regrettés! J'échangerais ce qu'il me reste à vivre Contre un des mois qu'ici Dieu m'a comptés, Pour rêver gloire, amour, plaisir, folie, Pour dépenser sa vie en peu d'instans, D'un long espoir pour la voir embellie, Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans!
THE GARRET.
With pensive eyes the little room I view, Where, in my youth, I weathered it so long; With a wild mistress, a stanch friend or two, And a light heart still breaking into song: Making a mock of life, and all its cares, Rich in the glory of my rising sun, Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs, In the brave days when I was twenty-one. Yes; 'tis a garret—let him know't who will— There was my bed—full hard it was and small. My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun; For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days when I was twenty-one. And see my little Jessy, first of all; She comes with pouting lips and sparkling eyes: Behold, how roguishly she pins her shawl Across the narrow casement, curtain-wise; Now by the bed her petticoat glides down, And when did woman look the worse in none? I have heard since who paid for many a gown, In the brave days when I was twenty-one. One jolly evening, when my friends and I Made happy music with our songs and cheers, A shout of triumph mounted up thus high, And distant cannon opened on our ears: We rise,—we join in the triumphant strain,— Napoleon conquers—Austerlitz is won— Tyrants shall never tread us down again, In the brave days when I was twenty-one. Let us begone—the place is sad and strange— How far, far off, these happy times appear; All that I have to live I'd gladly change For one such month as I have wasted here— To draw long dreams of beauty, love, and power, From founts of hope that never will outrun, And drink all life's quintessence in an hour, Give me the days when I was twenty-one!
ROGER-BONTEMPS.
Aux gens atrabilaires Pour exemple donné, En un temps de misères Roger-Bontemps est né. Vivre obscur à sa guise, Narguer les mécontens: Eh gai! c'est la devise Du gros Roger-Bontemps. Du chapeau de son père Coîffé dans le grands jours, De roses ou de lierre Le rajeunir toujours; Mettre un manteau de bure, Vieil ami de vingt ans; Eh gai! c'est la parure Du gros Roger-Bontemps. Posséder dans sa hutte Une table, un vieux lit, Des cartes, une flûte, Un broc que Dieu remplit; Un portrait de maîtresse, Un coffre et rien dedans; Eh gai! c'est la richesse Du gros Roger-Bontemps. Aux enfans de la ville Montrer de petits jeux; Etre fesseur habile De contes graveleux; Ne parler que de danse Et d'almanachs chantans; Eh gai! c'est la science Du gros Roger-Bontemps. Faute de vins d'élite, Sabler ceux du canton: Préférer Marguerite Aux dames du grand ton: De joie et de tendresse Remplir tous ses instans; Eh gai! c'est la sagesse Du gros Roger-Bontemps. Dire au ciel: Je me fie, Mon père, à ta bonté; De ma philosophie Pardonne le gaîté Que ma saison dernière Soit encore un printemps; Eh gai! c'est la prière Du gros Roger-Bontemps. Vous, pauvres pleins d'envie, Vous, riches désireux, Vous, dont le char dévie Après un cours heureux; Vous, qui perdrez peut-être Des titres éclatans, Eh gai! prenez pour maître Le gros Roger Bontemps.
JOLLY JACK.
When fierce political debate Throughout the isle was storming, And Rads attacked the throne and state, And Tories the reforming, To calm the furious rage of each, And right the land demented, Heaven sent us Jolly Jack, to teach The way to be contented. Jack's bed was straw, 'twas warm and soft, His chair, a three-legged stool; His broken jug was emptied oft, Yet, somehow, always full. His mistress' portrait decked the wall, His mirror had a crack; Yet, gay and glad, though this was all His wealth, lived Jolly Jack. To give advice to avarice, Teach pride its mean condition, And preach good sense to dull pretence, Was honest Jack's high mission. Our simple statesman found his rule Of moral in the flagon, And held his philosophic school Beneath the "George and Dragon." When village Solons cursed the Lords, And called the malt-tax sinful, Jack heeded not their angry words, But smiled and drank his skinful. And when men wasted health and life, In search
of rank and riches, Jack marked, aloof, the paltry strife, And wore his threadbare breeches. "I enter not the church," he said, "But I'll not seek to rob it;" So worthy Jack Joe Miller read, While others studied Cobbett. His talk it was of feast and fun; His guide the Almanack; From youth to age thus gayly run The life of Jolly Jack. And when Jack prayed, as oft he would, He humbly thanked his Maker; "I am," said he, "O Father good! Nor Catholic nor Quaker: Give each his creed, let each proclaim His catalogue of curses; I trust in Thee, and not in them, In Thee, and in Thy mercies! "Forgive me if, midst all Thy works, No hint I see of damning; And think there's faith among the Turks, And hope for e'en the Brahmin. Harmless my mind is, and my mirth, And kindly is my laughter: I cannot see the smiling earth, And think there's hell hereafter." Jack died; he left no legacy, Save that his story teaches:— Content to peevish poverty; Humility to riches. Ye scornful great, ye envious small, Come follow in his track; We all were happier, if we all Would copy JOLLY JACK.
FRENCH DRAMAS AND MELODRAMAS.
There are three kinds of drama in France, which you may subdivide as much as you please.
There is the old classical drama, wellnigh dead, and full time too: old tragedies, in which half a dozen characters appear, and spout sonorous Alexandrines for half a dozen hours. The fair Rachel has been trying to revive this genre, and to untomb Racine; but be not alarmed, Racine will never come to life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore. Madame Rachel can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it. Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and be-periwigged, lies in the grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised. There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid. An Englishman will seldom reconcile himself to the roulement of the verses, and the painful recurrence of the rhymes; for my part, I had rather go to Madame Saqui's or see Deburau dancing on a rope: his lines are quite as natural and poetical.
Then there is the comedy of the day, of which Monsieur Scribe is the father. Good heavens! with what a number of gay colonels, smart widows, and silly husbands has that gentleman peopled the play-books. How that unfortunate seventh commandment has been maltreated by him and his disciples. You will see four pieces, at the Gymnase, of a night; and so sure as you see them, four husbands shall be wickedly used. When is this joke to cease? Mon Dieu! Play-writers have handled it for about two thousand years, and the public, like a great baby, must have the tale repeated to it over and over again.
Finally, there is the Drama, that great monster which has sprung into life of late years; and which is said, but I don't believe a word of it, to have Shakspeare for a father. If Monsieur Scribe's plays may be said to be so many ingenious examples how to break one commandment, the drame is a grand and general chaos of them all; nay, several crimes are added, not prohibited in the Decalogue, which was written before dramas were. Of the drama, Victor Hugo and Dumas are the well-known and respectable guardians. Every piece Victor Hugo has written, since "Hernani," has contained a monster—a delightful monster, saved by one virtue. There is Triboulet, a foolish monster; Lucrèce Borgia, a maternal monster; Mary Tudor, a religious monster; Monsieur Quasimodo, a humpback monster; and others, that might be named, whose monstrosities we are induced to pardon—nay, admiringly to witness—because they are agreeably mingled with some exquisite display of affection. And, as the great Hugo has one monster to each play, the great Dumas has, ordinarily, half a dozen, to whom murder is nothing; common intrigue, and simple breakage of the before-mentioned commandment, nothing; but who live and move in a vast, delightful complication of crime, that cannot be easily conceived in England, much less described.
When I think over the number of crimes that I have seen Mademoiselle Georges, for instance, commit, I am filled with wonder at her greatness, and the greatness of the poets who have conceived these charming horrors for her. I have seen her make love to, and murder, her sons, in the "Tour de Nesle." I have seen her poison a company of no less than nine gentlemen, at Ferrara, with an affectionate son in the number; I have seen her, as Madame de Brinvilliers, kill off numbers of respectable relations in the first four acts; and, at the last, be actually burned at the stake, to which she comes shuddering, ghastly, barefooted, and in a white sheet. Sweet excitement of tender sympathies! Such tragedies are not so good as a real, downright execution; but, in point of interest, the next thing to it: with what a number of moral emotions do they fill the breast; with what a hatred for vice, and yet a true pity and respect for that grain of virtue that is to be found in us all: our bloody, daughter-loving Brinvilliers; our warmhearted, poisonous Lucretia Borgia; above all, what a smart appetite for a cool supper afterwards, at the Café Anglais, when the horrors of the play act as a piquant sauce to the supper!
Or, to speak more seriously, and to come, at last, to the point. After having seen most of the grand dramas which have been produced at Paris for the last half-dozen years, and thinking over all that one has seen,—the fictitious murders, rapes, adulteries, and other crimes, by which one has been interested and excited,—a man may take leave to be heartily ashamed of the manner in which he has spent his time; and of the hideous kind of mental intoxication in which he has permitted himself to indulge.
Nor are simple society outrages the only sort of crime in which the spectator of Paris plays has permitted himself to indulge; he has recreated himself with a deal of blasphemy besides, and has passed many pleasant evenings in beholding religion defiled and ridiculed.
Allusion has been made, in a former paper, to a fashion that lately obtained in France, and which went by the name of Catholic reaction; and as, in this happy country, fashion is everything, we have had not merely Catholic pictures and quasi religious books, but a number of Catholic plays have been produced, very edifying to the frequenters of the theatres or the Boulevards, who have learned more about religion from these performances than they have acquired, no doubt, in the whole of their lives before. In the course of a very few years we have seen—"The Wandering Jew;" "Belshazzar's Feast;" "Nebuchadnezzar:" and the "Massacre of the Innocents;" "Joseph and his Brethren;" "The Passage of the Red Sea;" and "The Deluge."
The great Dumas, like Madame Sand before mentioned, has brought a vast quantity of religion before the foot-lights. There was his famous tragedy of "Caligula," which, be it spoken to the shame of the Paris critics, was coldly received; nay, actually hissed, by them. And why? Because, says Dumas, it contained a great deal too much piety for the rogues. The public, he says, was much more religious, and understood him at once.
"As for the critics," says he, nobly, "let those who cried out against the immorality of Antony and Marguérite de Bourgogne, reproach me for THE CHASTITY OF MESSALINA." (This dear creature is the heroine of the play of "Caligula.") "It matters little to me. These people have but seen the form of my work: they have walked round the tent, but have not seen the arch which it covered; they have examined the vases and candles of the altar, but have not opened the tabernacle!
"The public alone has, instinctively, comprehended that there was, beneath this outward sign, an inward and mysterious grace: it followed the action of the piece in all its serpentine windings; it listened for four hours, with pious attention (avec recueillement et religion), to the sound of this rolling river of thoughts, which may have appeared to it new and bold, perhaps, but chaste and grave; and it retired, with its head on its breast, like a man who had just perceived, in a dream, the solution of a problem which he has long and vainly sought in his waking hours."
You see that not only Saint Sand is an apostle, in her way; but Saint Dumas is another. We have people in England who write for bread, like Dumas and Sand, and are paid so much for their line; but they don't set up for prophets. Mrs. Trollope has never declared that her novels are inspired by heaven; Mr. Buckstone has written a great number of farces, and never talked about the altar and the taberna
cle. Even Sir Edward Bulwer (who, on a similar occasion, when the critics found fault with a play of his, answered them by a pretty decent declaration of his own merits,) never ventured to say that he had received a divine mission, and was uttering five-act revelations.
All things considered, the tragedy of "Caligula" is a decent tragedy; as decent as the decent characters of the hero and heroine can allow it to be; it may be almost said, provokingly decent: but this, it must be remembered, is the characteristic of the modern French school (nay, of the English school too); and if the writer take the character of a remarkable scoundrel, it is ten to one but he turns out an amiable fellow, in whom we have all the warmest sympathy. "Caligula" is killed at the end of the performance; Messalina is comparatively well-behaved; and the sacred part of the performance, the tabernacle-characters apart from the mere "vase" and "candlestick" personages, may be said to be depicted in the person of a Christian convert, Stella, who has had the good fortune to be converted by no less a person than Mary Magdalene, when she, Stella, was staying on a visit to her aunt, near Narbonne.
STELLA (Continuant.) Voilà Que je vois s'avancer, sans pilote et sans rames, Une barque portant deux hommes et deux femmes, Et, spectacle inouï qui me ravit encor, Tous quatre avaient au front une auréole d'or D'où partaient des rayons de si vive lumière Que je fus obligée à baisser la paupière; Et, lorsque je rouvris les yeux avec effroi, Les voyageurs divins étaient auprès de moi. Un jour de chacun d'eux et dans toute sa gloire Je te raconterai la marveilleuse histoire, Et tu l'adoreras, j'espère; en ce moment, Ma mère, il te suffit de savoir seulement Que tous quatre venaient du fond de la Syrie: Un édit les avait bannis de leur patrie, Et, se faisant bourreaux, des hommes irrités, Sans avirons, sans eau, sans pain et garrotés, Sur une frêle barque échouée au rivage, Les avaient à la mer poussés dans un orage. Mais à peine l'esquif eut-il touché les flots Qu'au cantique chanté par les saints matelots, L'ouragan replia ses ailes frémissantes, Que la mer aplanit ses vagues mugissantes, Et qu'un soleil plus pur, reparaissant aux cieux, Enveloppa l'esquif d'un cercle radieux!...
The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh Page 31
